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Aug. 4, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
43:15
Are They The Baddies?
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Well, the Trump phenomenon has been puzzling people ever since Donald Trump popped onto the political scene and started making waves and drew enormous amounts of support from members of the conservative base, from people who are high school graduates in Ohio, from people who are college graduates in Florida.
Where was Trump's support base coming from?
And the left was utterly puzzled by this.
After all, Donald Trump was not historically socially conservative.
Donald Trump was not somebody who's historically even really a Republican.
Donald Trump was merely a major cultural figure who didn't seem to sneer at those people.
And so ever since, people on the left have been trying to figure out why is his brand so durable?
Why is it that so many people feel connected to Donald Trump?
And it's particularly true because Donald Trump continues to poll extremely highly among Republicans, despite the fact that his shot at beating Joe Biden is probably weaker than that of other Republicans, despite the fact that he's facing down a bevy of indictments.
You know, all of that happens to be true.
Trump right now is vulnerable mainly in the early states.
The primaries are not yet over.
If you look at the early states, Iowa in particular, Donald Trump's lead in Iowa is 24 points as opposed to 37 points nationally.
So that is a pretty significant difference.
And Ron DeSantis is in second place with 20% versus Trump's 44 in Iowa.
Tim Scott earning nine percentage points, Ramaswamy at five, Haley at four, Pence at three, et cetera.
Okay, so there are some vulnerabilities there, but the polling stats on, for example, the indictment surrounding Donald Trump, Show a disconnect between what conservatives think the rest of the country thinks and what the rest of the country actually thinks.
So conservatives think that people are going to immediately react to news of this spurious Trump indictment in Washington D.C.
with the sort of rage that they feel.
That we feel.
That people like me believe that Donald Trump is in fact being unfairly targeted by legal enforcement.
Well, Hunter Biden is being let off the hook, and this is really happening because, of course, he's the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and because Democrats hate the guy, and also because Democrats would like to see him elevated to the nomination.
And so we tend to believe, okay, well, you know, if Donald Trump is the nominee, many people in the middle will resonate to that argument, that he's being treated unfairly, therefore he should be elevated to the nation's highest office.
But that's not actually what the polls show.
When you look at how voters see the indictments, what you see is that on the 2020 election indictment, 52% of voters approve of the federal indictment, the same number on the classified documents indictment, which suggests that it's really not about the topic or even about the legal case against Donald Trump.
Basically, 52% of voters want to see Donald Trump in the dock.
That is really what that comes down to, which is a sheer majority, because the classified documents case is a much stronger case legally than the 2020 election indictment case.
Now, among independents, there actually is a difference.
This is what's kind of interesting.
Among independents, 59% say that they approve of Donald Trump being indicted on the 2020 election stuff.
Only 49% say they approve on the classified documents stuff, which is, again, fascinating.
You would think that it would be the reverse because, again, the classified documents case is much stronger, legally speaking, than the election stuff from 2020.
All it really shows is that independents really don't like Donald Trump talking about the 2020 election.
They really don't like what he did in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
They really don't like January 6th.
OK, but there remains this massive disconnect between the conservative base and independents and the rest of the country with regard to President Trump.
And this raises questions like, why is it that so many Republicans Are really, really behind Trump in deep and abiding ways.
And the answer is that it has less to do with Donald Trump than it has to do with reaction to leftist elites.
That really is the and that's always been the answer.
I've said since the beginning of the Trump phenomenon that Donald Trump has always represented two conservatives and two traditionalists, a giant pulsating middle finger, an orange middle finger.
Directed at the entire left-wing apparatus.
That's what he is, right?
The single best summation of the Trump phenomenon is, and get ready here with the bleep button, Trump, because f*** you, right?
That has always been the appeal of Donald Trump.
That was the appeal of Donald Trump in 2015, 2016.
It was the appeal of Donald Trump in 2020.
And it's even more the appeal of Donald Trump in 2023, 2024.
You don't get to tell us what to do is sort of the generalized mood with regard to President Trump.
So the question is, where does that mood come from?
Where does it come from?
And the answer is it is a direct reaction to a liberal elite who have decided that their values are more important than your values.
Who have decided that their priorities are more important than your priorities.
And frankly, it comes from a group of people who could theoretically be called values traitors.
Okay, so to understand what exactly is going on here, You sort of have to think of the framework of history, broad read.
So Karl Marx famously says at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, along with Engels, he says, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.
And this is wrong.
Now, that phrase has shaped nearly every theory about politics in the modern era.
Everybody ranging from Francis Fukuyama to the Marxist theorists of the early 20th century is shaped by the idea that everything is about class.
Today's politicians, left and right, Bernie Sanders, and on the right, people like Tucker Carlson, very often tend to conflate issues that are values-laden with issues that are economic-laden.
So the idea is that the forgotten man is actually the person who's being left behind by the new meritocracy, by the economy, that everything is about class conflict.
And if only we could redistribute, if only we could subsidize, we could do all of that and we could create solidarity again.
All we would have to do is change the economic systems by which we live and this would magically fix everything.
But it's not true.
The history of existing society, for all of human history, has not actually been about class conflict.
In fact, virtually no conflicts in the history of humanity have been fought purely over class.
This is what World War I did to the Marxist idea.
World War I completely defeated the Marxist idea.
The Marxist idea in World War I is that there would be, Europe-wide, a class revolution to end World War I. In fact, the home of Marxist revolution was not supposed to be in Russia, which basically had no classes.
It had like a group of a few elites, and then it had a giant, giant proletariat.
Basically, farmers, serfs, people who are very poor.
It wasn't supposed to happen in poor countries.
If you look at Karl Marx's writings, it was supposed to happen in, like, Great Britain.
It was supposed to happen in richer countries, where the excesses of capitalism would eventually cause so much income inequality and wealth inequality that lower classes would rebel against upper classes.
And thus, when World War I broke out, Marxists were utterly befuddled.
Because instead of the conflict breaking out between lower classes, middle classes, and upper classes, the conflict instead broke out between nationalities.
It broke out over borders.
And Germans who are very poor sided with Germans who are very rich to fight British people who are very poor and British people who are very rich.
And it didn't cross-pollinate across class.
Marx was wrong.
World War I proved him wrong.
But his idea continues to be the motivating factor in nearly all thinking politically still, which is the idea that economic circumstances determine class solidarity, which in turn determines politics.
And it's not true.
The real answer to the driving force behind history is, in fact, community.
Community.
Community of interest.
If we were going to rephrase Marx, what we would come up with is the history of all hitherto existing societies, the history of community struggles.
Struggles between creedal communities, religious communities.
People who have a common interest because they live together, because they share certain values.
That is the real struggle that is taking place in America, and that is the real reason that Donald Trump is a representative of a particular class.
He's not a representative of the lower classes, Donald Trump.
Because there are a bunch of people, like me, who make a lot of money, who would support Donald Trump against Joe Biden, and did in 2020.
There are a bunch of people who are middle class, who are supporting Donald Trump against Joe Biden.
And there are a bunch of people who are lower class who are supporting Donald Trump against Joe Biden despite the redistributionist promises of Democrats.
So what is that about?
That is not about economic circumstances.
It's not about pure redistributionism.
It's not about class struggle.
It's about community struggle.
We'll get to what that means in just one second.
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Okay, so which is a description of how society works?
Which is a description of what are the sort of cleavage points, the points at which Americans separate from one another.
And where do you, in order to explain, you have to explain where Americans unify.
We don't unify around class.
Middle-class people in California don't necessarily agree with middle-class people in Florida.
Poor people in Mississippi don't necessarily agree with poor people in New York.
Rich people in Nebraska don't necessarily agree with rich people in Chicago.
So it's really not about class.
It really is about communities of interest.
Historically, that has often been religious community.
If you're talking about historic wars, basically, from the dawn of time until the Peace of Westphalia, virtually all war was religious in nature.
Then afterward, it turned into nationalistic war.
And now we are sort of back to religious war.
As it turns out, wars are very rarely fought on the basis of pure economic ideals alone.
And if it is an economic ideal, it's not because it's an economic ideal.
It's because it's a religion.
Marxism has effectively become a religion.
Soviet communism was a religion with a great sainted leader at the top who must be worshipped.
And so the real cleavage in American society right now is not an economic cleavage per se.
It is a values cleavage.
It is a community cleavage.
It is a cleavage between people who have more traditionalist values with regard to the United States and people who do not.
And that has led to a class conflict as people who are high-income earners have essentially left behind their church and their community of interest and have formed a new community of interest with other people who earn.
So we are now transmuting what were values conflicts into class conflicts.
Which is weird, because, again, if you actually go over to Silicon Valley, widely perceived as a leftist hotbed, and I know tons of people in Silicon Valley, I talk with them regularly.
If you actually go over to Silicon Valley, and you talk to the heads of social media companies, the same people who are promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, environmental, social governance, those same exact people, in their own homes, they are practicing conservatives.
Those same people are married.
They've been married for 20 years.
They have kids.
They don't let their kids play with the social media apps that they themselves create.
The values they actually live out in their daily lives are fairly conservative.
This is a point that Charles Murray makes in Coming Apart.
All the same people who are preaching liberal nonsense directed at the very poorest in society who they see as essentially playthings of the gods, the gods being themselves.
Those very same people live values that are much more consistent with conservative middle class Americans.
Traditionalist Americans.
And it's sort of a fascinating phenomenon.
To understand this, you have to understand two separate ideas of what they call the Forgotten Man.
So the Forgotten Man is a phrase that's used in politics all the time.
And who is the person at whom politics ought to be directed?
The Forgotten Man, the person who is left behind.
So who exactly is this Forgotten Man?
That phrase was made famous originally by Franklin Delano Roosevelt back in 1932.
And the Forgotten Man, according to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was the guy who's poor.
The guy who's really poor.
He's been forgotten by society, and it's our job to make it up for him.
And the way to do that is to essentially redistribute all of America's resources with that guy in mind.
Leave meritocracy behind.
Leave the idea of performance behind.
The person at the bottom of the spectrum is the person we ought to focus on.
And this has defined Democratic Party policy for a very long time.
You combine that on an economic level with the idea that liberal social policy ought to prevail, and that basically defines the Democratic Party today.
According to Democrats, the Forgotten Man is the poor guy who must be given money and then preached to about the virtues of transgenderism and social justice.
And then there's another concept of who the Forgotten Man is.
And that's the actual original concept of who the Forgotten Man is.
So there was a Yale University professor named William Graham Sumner.
As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B. And A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X.
What I want to do is look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is.
I call him the Forgotten Man.
Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct.
He is the man who is never thought of.
I call him the Forgotten Man.
He works.
He votes.
Generally, he prays, but he always pays.
So who is the Forgotten Man, according to Sumner?
That is the person who has the traditional values.
It's the person who goes to church, the person who supports his community, and the person who is targeted by the people in the elite class On a values level.
Because they don't care about his values.
They don't care about that.
And he's always the person who they are taking from, both in terms of values, for themselves, and then attempting to destroy the values and institutions upon which he relies.
And they're also taking from him economically in certain ways as well.
But it's really more about the values than it is even about the economic takings.
Because the truth is, in the United States, the people at the very top of the economic spectrum pay nearly all income tax.
It is not the middle class paying income tax in the United States.
It is the rich people paying income tax.
So really, what is this?
It's not a class conflict.
It is a values conflict in which you have an elite group at the top who are promulgating a set of values that is absolutely destructive and that they themselves do not live by to people in the middle class and people who are in the lower economic classes.
That is not an economic conflict.
That is, in fact, a community struggle, as I say.
That is not part of the history of class conflict.
It's a community struggle.
And this is what is undergirding David Brooks's column today.
It's a fascinating column in the New York Times where he's trying to grapple with the Trump phenomenon.
He can't quite escape the sort of Marxist tinge to all history being described by class conflict, but it is starting to dawn on him that perhaps attacks on traditional Judeo-Christian values are in fact the defining feature of our politics right now.
And that when America is dividing, it is not dividing along class lines, it's dividing between people who believe that traditional Judeo-Christian values are good and people who believe that traditional Judeo-Christian values are really, really bad.
You wonder why culture wars are first and foremost in everybody's mind?
Because the things that we actually care about It's not actually predominantly our pocketbook.
We all care about our pocketbook.
That is not predominantly what we care about when it comes time to make our lifelong decisions about what matters to us.
It is values.
It is always values.
It will always be values.
It has always been values.
Economics determine what jobs we take.
They may determine where we live, but it's values that determine how we live.
And that's the thing in the end that actually matters the most to us.
When you have an entire cadre of elite liberals who presumably do not even live their own values but are cramming down an alternative set of values on all of America in the name of the quote-unquote marginalized.
When that happens there is going to be a backlash and that backlash is taking the form of Trump.
Not because Trump is a great representative of traditional Judeo-Christian values but because when you are assaulted enough all you want to do is throw the bird.
That's what Trump is.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so, all this is a lead up to this David Brooks column, which is making the rounds today, called, What If We're the Bad Guys Here?
And here's what David Brooks writes, quote, Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis.
And he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls.
And he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys.
Trump's poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.
What's going on here?
Why is this guy still politically viable after all he's done?
We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that.
It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Mark
Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas Edsel recently quote,
Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast and they want to slow it down,
maybe even take a step backward. But if you're a person of color, a woman who values gender
equality or an LGBT person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.
In this story, says David Brooks, we anti-Trumpers are the good guys,
the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians.
Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day, he's still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentment, and that's what matters to the most.
I partly agree with this story, says David Brooks, but it's also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.
So let's be clear about this.
This elite self-satisfaction really took the fourth Barack Obama.
There's a fascinating interview over at Tablet Magazine all about Barack Obama and his value system.
And all the things the media ignored about Barack Obama, including the fact that he was like a bleeding anti-Semite back in his college days and all this.
But he's a member of the liberal elite who hated the values of the so-called bitter clingers.
And it became a sort of cultural cachet to rip on people who had traditional Judeo-Christian values with regard to life.
So David Brooks says, let me try another story on you.
I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys.
In fact, we're the bad guys.
And here is where David Brooks, some of what he's about to say is right, and some of it is a conflation of sort of Marxist theory with the actual history of humanity, which is the story of community struggle.
Quote, this story begins in the 1960s when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam,
but the children of the educated class got college deferments.
Okay, that that is true, right?
He's trying to draw this as a class conflict.
That high school grads went to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferment.
That is certainly true.
However, it is also true that the objections to the Vietnam War did not come from the high school educated class.
They came from the same college elites who got the college deferments.
Patriotic Americans were willing to go fight in Vietnam, and they did.
And they died in large numbers.
By the way, disproportionately white people.
All the myths about how Vietnam was a bunch of poor black people who were dying, that's actually not true.
It's like 88% of all casualties in Vietnam were white people.
50% of all people who were serving in Vietnam were middle class.
So it was not all kind of poor brown people as the platoon myth would sort of suggest.
Virtually a huge percentage, like 86% of everybody who served in Vietnam was actually a volunteer, not drafted.
But put all that aside, what David Brooks is missing here is that Vietnam was a values conflict.
It was a community conflict between a bunch of long-haired, hippie, left-wing, Judeo-Christian, values-rejecting elites on college campuses who weren't even serving who objected to the war.
It was not all the people who went to church who objected to the war.
It was all the people who dropped out of church and dropped acid who objected to the war.
That was the actual cultural breakdown that we now try to rewrite into a history of class conflict.
He said it continues in the 1970s when the authorities imposed busing on working class areas of Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves live.
That is 100% true.
That part, again, that's a communities conflict, right?
The idea here is that a bunch of liberal left-wing elites went and lived in super white areas and then imposed forced busing on a bunch of poor white people and poor black people.
That part is true, but that's not, again, a class conflict.
That's a community conflict because if those liberals actually believed their own values, they would be imposing it on themselves as well.
The ideal that we're all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there.
He is right about this, but on a values level, as I'll discuss more in just one second.
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Okay, so back to this David Brooks column.
He says, Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
This is again true, but the reality is that it's not even that they build systems that serve themselves.
It's that the systems that they themselves build are not intended for themselves on a values level.
So, David Brooks has this thing against the meritocracy, and this is where I don't like the conflation between the Marxist history of class struggle and the history of community struggle, which is not the same.
It really is not.
I mean, just to take a quick example, John J. Rockefeller used to go to church, like on the regular, and he gave tons of charity inside his own church from the time he was very young.
He was more in line with poor members of his church than he was in line with many members of his own social class.
This is just the reality.
Ripping on meritocracy doesn't solve the problem.
It's a Marxist solution to a spiritual values problem.
Because here's the thing, what's the alternative to a meritocracy?
When I see people both left and right ripping on the meritocracy, meaning like the people who are most meritorious get the job, and right now in an information age that is going to benefit people who have more facility with information than other people.
But it's also true in construction where people who have more facility with machines are going to do better than people who do not have facility with machines.
People who have facility with plumbing are going to do better in that industry than people who do not have facility with plumbing.
What's the alternative?
No one has ever provided an alternative to meritocracy that makes any sense on the economic level.
This is why I really object to the crossing streams of promoting the meritocracy with promoting liberal left-wing social values.
Those are not the same thing.
The best system is a system in which, economically speaking, meritocracy does obtain, but also that is backed by Judeo-Christian values of community, wherein we all care about each other because we share a set of values.
That is the best form of the system.
David Brooks, however, again, infused by this sort of thoroughgoing Marxist ideal.
And again, he's not a Marxist, but this is an ideal that has permeated pretty much every area of social science.
The class struggle and all this nonsense.
He says the meritocracy is the problem.
He says the most important of these systems that's a problem is the modern meritocracy.
We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality we possess most.
Academic achievement.
Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs, and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other, and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
He's conflating a bunch of stuff here.
So, credentialism is indeed bad.
You don't have to go to college in order to make an amazing living in the United States and lead a business.
Our business here at Daily Wire is led by a triumvirate.
It is me, a Harvard Law School and UCLA grad.
It is Jeremy Boring, a guy who did not graduate from college.
And it's Caleb Robinson, a person who did not even go to college.
That is our triumvirate.
The thing that we share is we're pretty good at business, and we're all pretty smart, but it ain't the credential, it's the performance.
When he says that this is a pathway that's unavailable to anyone, by the way, I challenge him to look at the entire Asian community in the United States, which wildly outperforms, based on class data, where they should be.
In terms of their kids.
By the way, how does he think that people become rich in this country?
He's assuming a self-perpetuating elite.
But let's be real about this.
Again, Jeremy did not grow up wealthy.
His kids will.
Caleb did not grow up wealthy.
His kids will.
I, contrary to public opinion, did not grow up wealthy.
My kids will.
For the record, I grew up until I was 11 years old in a two-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot house in Burbank, California, with six people sharing one bathroom.
I shared a bedroom with three younger sisters until I was 11 years old, okay?
That doesn't mean I was poor, I was solidly middle class.
But that's like solidly middle class, not solidly upper class.
The point here is that, again, he's conflating class struggle with the actual struggle here, and so he's missing the point.
Here is the part where he is totally right, however.
He says, And when he gets beyond all of this, quote, armed with all kinds of economic, cultural, and political power, we support policies that help ourselves.
Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China.
Again, he's messing up the economics here, but here's the part where he gets to the part that actually matters.
Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others.
Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx, and intersectional is a sure sign you've got cultural capital coming out of your ears.
Meanwhile, members of the less educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we've changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
We also changed the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others.
For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedoms.
After the social norms eroded, a funny thing happened.
Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock.
People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that.
As Adrian Woolridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, The Aristocracy of Talent, quote, 60% of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with 10% to women with a university degree.
That matters, he continues, because the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.
Does this mean I think people in my class are vicious and evil?
No.
Most of us are earnest, kind, and public-spirited, but we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive.
Elite institutions have become politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.
It's easy to understand why people in less educated classes would conclude they are under economic, political, cultural, and moral assault.
And why they've rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.
Again, it is not really about the educated class.
It's about a cultural class that has decided, writ large, that the morality of the forgotten man, the person who actively holds together the community, who provides the glue, who provides the nationalism, patriotism, and allegiance to traditional Judeo-Christian values that undergird any sense of social solidarity, it's those people they're attacking.
It's that glue that they are disintegrating.
And those people, by the way, are living off the fat of the land because they are benefiting from all of those things.
They are still living inside solid two-parent households, taking care of their kids and sending them to private schools.
The limousine liberal is not a limousine liberal because he takes a literal limousine.
He's a limousine liberal because he lives a set of values that he then rejects writ large.
When you say at your church, I want my kids to get married, Go to church, have children within wedlock, and get a job.
When you say that, and then the person who does virtually all of those things in San Jose says, no, no, no, that's bigotry.
We need to set up a system where if you don't get married, you have kids out of wedlock, you don't go to church, and you don't get a job, we pay you.
Then of course people in the middle are going to say, what in the hell is going on?
What is wrong with you people?
If you want to talk about people, there's phraseology in Marxism that talks about class traitors.
Class traitors, presumably, are people in the working class who vote with the elite.
People who vote for the meritocracy or who vote for capitalism, even though they're members of the lower class.
This was the basis.
of a famous book by Thomas Frank in the middle of the 2000s called What's the Matter with Kansas in which he said, Why are there all these poor people in Kansas who keep voting Republican when they could be voting benefits to themselves?
And the answer, of course, was they're not voting based on the benefits.
They're voting based on the values which matter more to them than the actual government handouts.
But that's how the left tends to think.
The reality is that we shouldn't be talking about class traitors.
We should be talking about values traitors.
People who live a set of values and then promulgate a completely different set of values to other people who are too stupid and too poor to actually live those values.
The assumption is that everybody who is not living in San Jose, everybody who's not living in Uppercross Manhattan, all those people are too stupid to actually live values that most of these people themselves actually live.
And that's, by the way, why people who live traditional Judeo-Christian values, they tend to have stereotypical beliefs about people living in San Jose and New York.
They think that they're all in polygamous gay relationships because they believe that that's a set of values being promoted by San Jose and Manhattan, when that actually is not what they're actually living out.
And then people in San Jose and Manhattan are like, well, why do they think all this stuff about us?
Well, maybe it's because you make the mark of virtue flying the Pride Progress flag from your house.
Maybe it's that.
Even while you are living in a heterosexual monogamous relationship with three children with a white picket fence.
Maybe it's that thing.
Maybe the way that social solidarity was actually created and promulgated in the United States used to be rich people, poor people, and middle class people all went to church together.
They all sent their kids to the same schools.
They all actually interacted with one another and had very similar sets of values.
Again, John J. Rockefeller went to the same church as the poor janitor down the street.
But I have a question.
Do you really believe that, say, Jack Dorsey or Susan Wojcicki Or any of the bank leaders?
Do you think those people are going to church with poor people?
Or do you think they are hanging out exclusively with people at their country club who are members of the same socio-economic liberal elite?
The answer is the latter.
And that means that they've cut themselves off from the same value system that used to actually create social solidarity.
Okay, and that is now being telescoped.
All that's being telescoped into Trump.
Because, again, the way that virtually all politics works is that even unconsciously, we all just look for symbols.
And the symbol right now of resistance to these liberal elites who have decided to make virtue signaling the most important thing among themselves, that is the thing that matters more than anything, there are two symbols today.
That this has happened, and it's amazing to watch it happen.
One is resistance to Trump.
They are the resistance.
Trump is a fascist.
That means everybody on the right goes, you know what?
Middle finger.
Trump.
That's one reason for Trump's durability.
Another issue where you can see this absolutely clearly is in support for the war in Ukraine.
So the beginning of the war in Ukraine, heavy bipartisan support for the war in Ukraine.
Heavy.
I mean, look at the polling data.
Republicans, Democrats, Independents, everybody supported the idea that Ukraine should be able to fend off a Russian invasion.
And then, the minute that the left transmuted that into a values conflict about upholding, quote-unquote, liberal democracy with pride progress flags, an enormous number of people on the right went, oh, now we see what you're doing.
They said, oh, the minute that a conflict that was not actually a cultural values conflict was transmuted into a cultural values conflict in which the same liberal elites who hate your church suddenly love Ukraine, a bunch of people went, nope, not interested.
It's that reactionary and understandable reactionary politics that's driving everything right now.
The answer to all of this would be a re-engagement in social solidarity by the liberal elite.
But that would require them to understand that their quote-unquote pursuit of justice for the marginalized It's not about pursuit of justice for the marginalized anymore and hasn't been for a very, very long time.
What it's really about is a transgressive notion that if you destroy the center, you have made the world a better place.
Okay, the Cultural War was not started by the right.
It was not even remotely started by the right.
You know how you know?
Because of the battlefield.
If the Cultural War had been started by the right, would we be talking about whether boys can become girls and girls can become boys?
Of course not.
That wasn't even considered a battle five years ago.
Now it's a massive battle.
And this is true for every victory gained on the liberal elite battlefield.
And now it's all being, as I say, telescoped into Trump.
And if Trump is the symbol of resistance, then attacks on Trump are seen as symbols of the regime tearing down Trump.
Which brings us to Donald Trump showing up in Washington, D.C.
yesterday.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Meanwhile, Donald Trump, of course, the symbol of this entire conflict between communities.
Again, it is not a class conflict.
It is a communities conflict, which is why you are seeing churchgoers who are Latino and churchgoers who are black and churchgoers who are white all supporting Donald Trump.
That would be the reason.
In any case, Donald Trump pled not guilty yesterday in a Washington, D.C.
courtroom.
He appeared in federal court.
There was no mugshot.
Everybody's still assuming there will at some point be a mugshot of Trump in court.
There probably will.
Probably is gonna happen when he gets arrested in this Georgia case surrounding January 6th.
The cases I've been describing is really, really spurious.
Politico describes what it was like inside the courtroom.
They said if you blinked, you missed it for a fleeting moment.
Thursday, Donald Trump and special counsel Jack Smith appeared to make eye contact as the former president prepared to fend off charges that he sought to subvert American democracy itself.
That shared grants crystallized the historic weight of Thursday's arraignment.
The third in recent months for the former president was fighting federal and local prosecutors, even as he appears to be coasting to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Smith said nothing audible during his hour in the room, but repeatedly shot glances at Trump, who occasionally shot them back until their eyes briefly met.
Even before Donald Trump entered, a federal courtman declared himself not guilty.
The weight of history was evident in Washington, D.C.' 's federal courthouse.
Minutes before Trump entered the silent room, several federal judges filed into the public gallery, turning themselves into spectators in a building they typically rule.
After a day of anticipation, the atmosphere darkened the moment Smith strode into the wood-paneled chandelier courtroom from a nearby antechamber.
Smith was flanked by Assistant Special Counselor Ray Hulser and several FBI case agents as he made his way to the back of the courtroom as well.
Moments later, there was Trump, seated at a table that has in recent months been occupied by some of the very people who stormed the Capitol and are now paying a legal price.
Oh, the drama!
Oh, the magical drama!
Well, Donald Trump came out and was, you know, a combination of, I would say, Stoic, blasé, and a little bit, I would say, puckish.
So, Donald Trump actually posted this on Truth Social.
Honestly, this is why people love him.
Giant middle finger.
Pulsating giant middle finger.
All the time middle finger.
And that I was then arrested by my political opponent, who's losing badly to me in the polls,
crooked Joe Biden. It was a very good day.
Honestly, this is why people love him. Giant middle finger, pulsating giant middle finger,
all the time middle finger, all the time. Again, Donald Trump 2024, because f*** you.
Here is Donald Trump's actual verbal response.
Well, thank you very much.
This is a very sad day for America.
And it was also very sad driving through Washington, D.C.
and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti.
The place that I left.
It's a very sad thing to see it.
When you look at what's happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent.
This was never supposed to happen in America.
This is the persecution of the person that's leading by very, very substantial numbers in the Republican primary and leading Biden by a lot.
So if you can't beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him.
We can't let this happen in America.
Thank you very much.
I mean, to be fair, he is not in the polls leading Joe Biden by a lot.
The last polls have him basically dead even.
But the point is taken.
It is obviously true that he is, in fact, being hit with a variety of charges that no one in the Democratic Party would ever be hit with without a doubt.
He then added later on another show that would be very dangerous if he were jailed, which, of course, is also true.
We have not seen in the United States a former president of the United States thrown in jail.
Is it something that concerns you of, you know, of the people making sure that they don't go out of their right mind if something like that happens?
Because I know what I'm thinking of could happen if that, for example, they do, say, Jack Smith says, OK, I'm going to put Donald Trump in jail.
I think it's a very dangerous thing to even talk about because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters and I mean maybe, you know, maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty.
I've never seen anything like it.
Much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016.
Okay, so of course the left is taking this as a threat of violence.
Trump himself is vowing revenge if he takes office in 2024.
He posted on Truth Social to that effect and said, Look, it's not my fault.
My political opponent in the Democratic Party, crooked Joe Biden, has told his attorney general to charge the leading Republican nominee and former president of the United States, me, with as many crimes as can be concocted so that he is forced to spend large amounts of time and money to defend himself.
The Dems don't want to run against me or they would not be doing this unprecedented weaponization of quote-unquote justice.
But soon in 2024, it will be our turn.
MAGA!
Um, so, you know, that's what this battle is going to come down to.
And of course, this is the language that's being spoken by a lot of the Republican primary electorate, because that has always been the language spoken by the Republican primary electorate.
The problem, of course, is that independents don't actually hear this call.
And this is the thing that I'm warning a lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives, a lot of voters in these primaries.
Just because you feel and believe the thing doesn't mean that political independents and swing voters are going to feel the thing.
We have to get out of our own heads a little bit.
I understand the thing.
I feel the thing myself.
I also understand that I'm not the only voter in the 2024 election.
The Donald Trump case here is going to come down to, in the end, basically one issue with regard to this legal case.
The issue is going to be whether Donald Trump actually believed that he lost the election.
If they can prove that Donald Trump believed that he lost the election, it'll be fairly easy for them to convince a D.C.
jury That Donald Trump was lying, that it was fraudulent, and all this.
Now, I don't think that the elements of this crime are tailor-made for this.
I think it's very difficult to see how this fits into a civil rights violation, or how this fits into a fraud case, or even how it fits into an obstruction case.
But, at the very least, they're going to have to prove that he knowingly did all these things, knowingly gets into Donald Trump's head.
That's really what this is all about.
And this is what Donald Trump's lawyer was saying yesterday.
One of Donald Trump's lawyers, her name was Alina Haba.
She said, just because he was told he lost the election doesn't mean that he believed he lost the election.
Here she was yesterday.
There's testimony and there's a number of aides that have said that the president was made aware that he lost the election and yet continued to argue that it was stolen from him.
How do you reconcile those two things?
Well, I think that everybody was made aware that he lost the election, but that doesn't mean that that was the only advice he was given.
As anybody understands what happens in the Oval Office, there are a numerous amount of advisors and politicians and lawyers, not just one or two, that are giving you advice and telling you what they believe is true.
So, he may not agree with Mike Pence, he may not agree with one of his lawyers, but that doesn't mean that there weren't other people advising him exactly the opposite.
Okay, so, again, they're taking her out of context and they're suggesting that, yeah, yeah, yeah, he was told he was told so he knew.
He was told.
That doesn't mean he believed a thing.
That's very common for Donald Trump.
He was told lots of things that he doesn't believe.
Meanwhile, Ty Cobb, who's a former Trump lawyer, he says that, well, you know, if he actually pursued a conspiracy knowingly, then that is violation of law.
That's not free speech.
Again, it's all going to come down to knowingly.
Here's Ty Cobb.
He's been out insisting that they're criminalizing speech, where the simple counter to that is you actually can facilitate and further a crime through speech and be prosecuted for it.
I saw an example in some of the reporting today where if Tony Soprano tells one of his guys to whack a witness, well, that's speech, but that's a crime.
Okay, well, that's true, but you actually would have to have him do that, which is not exactly what happened in this particular case.
So, what's gonna happen in D.C.?
Well, I mean, it's a D.C.
jury.
It probably is gonna be very bad for President Trump.
The real question is what that means for the 2024 election.
And again, I remind everybody, two things can be true at once.
It can be an unjust indictment.
They can be going after Trump unfairly.
And also, Trump may not be the best person to run for the Republican Party while facing indictments every other day from now until the election, while independents look at him and scoff.
Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.
We'll be back here on Monday with much more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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